Consider U.S. workers first

Your editorial "Visa fight returns" (Nov. 26) warns of "fear, ignorance and misinformation being peddled about H-1Bs." Unfortunately, you are contributing to the misinformation.

You are incorrect that employers are "expressly prohibited from paying less than the going rate to H-1Bs, or from firing an American to hire one." The Department of Labor rubber-stamps these applications, including for accountants and engineers, for wages as low as $17 per hour.

The statute 20 CFR 655 does not preclude firing Americans to hire H-1Bs. Worse, there is no provision that employers first advertise and consider qualified workers. Indian companies, for example, can legally choose to hire only H-1B workers.

You claim it's "unlikely that foreigners with doctorate will be ignorant of their value." The University of California Davis is paying H-1B "postdoctoral scholars" as little as $31,000 per year. Unlike Americans, they are indentured servants to their employer -- with an additional incentive to obtain a green card.

Hewlett-Packard and Intel secured dozens of H-1B applications in fiscal 2004 for this region, even as both laid off scores of skilled Americans and didn't run help-wanted ads or recruit at local colleges. Here's the Programmers' Guild URL to the 1,000 H-1B applications that the Department of Labor approved in fiscal 2004 for the Sacramento region (readers can judge if no Americans could fill these positions): www.programmersguild.org/RIR/.

The solution is not to raise the cap, but rather to change the law requiring employers to advertise and consider qualified Americans before being permitted to hire foreign workers.